Saturday, January 30, 2010

My heroes in Postman's Park by Christopher Reid



My heroes in Postman's Park, by Christopher Reid

Christopher Reid
Saturday 30 January 2010

I
find it difficult to nominate any one person as my hero. Heroism seems to me a more common, if hidden, quality than is widely supposed. It may even be a defining characteristic of humanity, although instances of its opposites – cowardice, selfishness – flourish around us.


When I contemplate the word "hero", no particular face or figure, no documented life – with its compromising flaws and peccadilloes – comes to mind. I do, however, have a topographical focus. This is the patch of green in the City of London that has come to be known as Postman's Park, from its proximity to what was the General Post Office across King ­Edward Street.
The park stands on the old burial ground of St Botolph's Aldersgate. Along one edge there is a sort of ­arcade or loggia, like a single side of a cloister, lined with ceramic plaques memorialising the bravery of individuals who died while saving the lives of others. I say "individuals", and of course that is what they were when they lived, but little or nothing is now known about them beyond the courageous actions recorded tersely in the Arts and Crafts lettering of these plaques. If we did know more, then we might have to take into account that X, who, snatching a stranger from a river, was drowned himself, was also a rogue and wife-beater; or that Y, who rescued children from a fire but was ­fatally burned in the process, had the morals of a slut.
In literary terms, these citations are not unlike the gleanings of newspaper reports from 1906 that Félix Fénéon collected privately and which were published not long ago as Novels in Three Lines. But whereas Fénéon's treatment emphasises the brutality and folly of human behaviour, the shrine in Postman's Park, which the painter GF Watts paid for just a few years earlier, presents, in a contradictory spirit but without false piety, reasons to be humbled and hopeful. So my almost vanished, multiple heroes are to be found in this sacred place.
THE GUARDIAN






2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016




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Saturday, January 23, 2010

My hero / My father John Gross by Philip Gross



My hero, my father John Gross, by Philip Gross

Philip Gross
Saturday 23 January 2010


H
ere's an old man, older than he ever reckoned to be. He doesn't look much like a hero – hair and beard a bit unkempt, and you can tell his eyesight's not up to the job of catching a food stain here and there. But he's got his walking stick and his eccentric beret, and he strides through the backstreets, rain or shine. Don't ask him where he's going; he'll just see your lips moving, your look of slight impatience or concern . . . because his hearing has crumbled, from the top registers downwards: birdsong went first; now there's mainly the confusing growl of traffic. Bang a car door and he'll startle, as if it's a gunshot. For him that isn't a figure of speech; 65 years ago he was ducking and weaving his way across Europe in the awful closing movements of the war.

But that's another story, one he won't tell now, because words have deserted him – the three or four languages he had at his command gone with a series of small strokes, the attrition of age, aphasia . . . Can you imagine: cut off from the sound of human voices, and from your own voice? You can read just, inch by inch, up close, and your fine motor control isn't up to more than two or three words before it goes haywire.
Now, look up. Address the world fairly in whatever phonemes you can muster. Put a bold foot forward. In the words of early Quaker George Fox, "Walk cheerfully over the world . . ."
We have never been a family for filial piety, still less for hero-worship. I have no idea whether he was a brave man in that war, or simply human. But looking at my father now, the way he bears his old age . . . I call that a bit heroic.



2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016



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Sunday, January 17, 2010

Resuscitating Zona Gale



Resuscitating Zona Gale

BIOGRAPHY


Zona Gale was born in Portage, Wisconsin, in 1874 and died in Chicago in 1938. Since then, we haven’t heard much about this writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Miss Lulu Bett in 1921.

Perhaps her stories are a little too sentimental. Friendship Village (1908), Friendship Village Love Stories (1909), Neighborhood Stories (1914), and other collections of short fiction really are penetrating in their perception and pictures of small-town life, and some newspaper critics referred to Friendship Village as a utopia. These same critics also declared Gale “one of the foremost writers of our time” alongside the literati of the starkest realism including Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Horatio Alger, Sinclair Lewis, and Edith Wharton.

To be sure, Gale didn’t dwell on the unpleasant side of human nature. One of my favorite characters in Friendship Village is the chatty spinster Calliope Marsh, ungrammatically pouring forth the milk of human kindness toward her neighbors.

Then social causes increasingly crept into her fiction, and she changed her views about idyllic village life, possibly stemming from her political views. As a political activist and supporter of the La Follette family, Gale joined the National Women’s Party, lobbied for the Wisconsin Equal Rights Law, and became a member of the executive committee of the Lucy Stone League. In 1923, she was appointed to the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, where she served until her death from pneumonia.



This new strain of writing includes her greatest successes, Miss Lulu Bett (1920) and Faint Perfume (1923), both satirical depictions of oppressive domesticity and female independence. It also produced the unpublished short story “The Reception Surprise,” which argues for equal rights for African Americans.

I’m a fan of Miss Lulu, who claims power and her rightful position in her home and in society at large. She understands that it’s her work that keeps the household running and that her family values her only as a servant. However, through her brief encounter with Ninian, Lulu begins to see that she possesses powers of her own, and she’s able to express herself and direct her own future rather than succumb to the will of those around her.

After she wrote this novel and adapted it for the stage, there was no returning to Friendship Village. Faint Perfume, another best-selling novel, indicts medical treatments designed to heal intellectual, overly stimulated women, as does Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s canonical “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Leda, an unmarried New York author stricken with neuritis, submits to her physician’s order to cease writing for one year and recover in her father’s house in the Midwest. Unlike Gilman, who liberates her heroine, Gale allows her protagonist to silently lose her mind, art, and identity.

Why should we invite Gale into our Wisconsin classrooms? All of these texts are open access and free at websites such as Hathi Trust Digital Library and Project Gutenberg, and they provide a great deal of insight into the rural communities where many of us teach. Is Friendship Village a century ago similar to contemporary Ingram in Rusk County, Lime Ridge in Sauk County, or another of the 400 villages around the state? Can you find current examples of Leda and Lulu in a state that only this month voted along party lines to advance the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution? How do small-town settings serve as a means of critiquing social institutions and ideas beyond the confines of the small town? In American fiction, the small town often serves as a crucible for democracy, and just as often doesn’t. Experiment with these stories and send your lesson plans and students’ reactions to an upcoming issue of Wisconsin English Journal.

THE WISCONSIN ENGLISH JOURNAL






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Saturday, January 16, 2010

My Hero / Sebastian Walker by Julie Myerson

Sebastian Walker



My Hero Sebastian Walker

Julie Myerson
Sat 16 Jan 2010


I
started working as Walker Books' publicist in 1988. Less than a month into the job – not great timing – I found I was pregnant. But Sebastian's face lit up. "My dear, I'll start a nursery. You can bring the baby into work with you!"
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Saturday, January 9, 2010

My hero / Bob Moog by Don Paterson



My hero Bob Moog

Don Paterson
Saturday 9 January 2010


B
ob Moog had a great name, which seemed to fit his machines almost as well as Mr Hoover's did his. (He never convinced anyone to pronounce it correctly: it rhymes with rogue.) He was also as far from the public image of "Dr Moog", the lab-coated evil genius and destroyer of human music, as it was possible to get: a sweet, patient, articulate man who saw himself purely as a toolmaker, determined to narrow, not widen, the gap between the player and the instrument.
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Saturday, January 2, 2010

Life and style / Viggo Mortensen / This world, the love of my life


LIFE AND SYTLE

Q&A: Viggo Mortensen


'If I could go back in time, I'd go to the first Viking ship to land in America'
"This world, the love of my life" 

Rosanna Greenstreet
Saturday 2 January 2010 00.10 GMT

Viggo Mortensen, 51, was born in New York to an American mother and a Danish father. He made his feature film debut in Peter Weir's Witness and went on to appear in Carlito's Way, The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, A History Of Violence and Eastern Promises, for which he was Oscar-nominated in 2008. His latest film, The Road, an adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy book, opens on Friday. He is divorced with one son, and lives in Idaho.
When were you happiest?

Right now. The past has gone.

What is your greatest fear?

The next thing I ought to do. With few exceptions, one ought always do what one is afraid of.

What is your earliest memory? 

Lying in my mother's lap and looking up at her face. I think we were in a car. I was one and a half, two, maybe. My next memory is also in a car, and I was standing behind my dad. I remember getting sick and throwing up down the back of my dad's shirt. He remembers it well.

Which living person do you most admire, and why? 

My son, Henry, because he is kind, which I think is the highest wisdom.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? 

Occasionally being mistrustful of others.

What is your most unappealing habit? 

It's hard to pick one!

What is your favourite smell? 

To truthfully answer at this time, I'd have to reveal something that is too intimate to reveal.

What is your guiltiest pleasure? 

Sleeping.

What is the worst job you've done? 

In a factory in Denmark when I was 20. All day long I had to punch a single hole in the centre of a square piece of metal.

To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why? 

My body – we all do things we shouldn't.

What is the love of your life? 

This world.

Which living person do you most despise? 

I don't think it solves anything to despise.

Which phrases do you most overuse? 

"Let me think about it."

What has been your biggest disappointment? 

That Barack Obama seems to be more concerned with becoming re-elected than with doing his very best to fulfil the promise of his candidacy.

If you could go back in time, where would you go? 

To the first Viking ship to land in North America.

When did you last cry, and why? 

Last night, because of a beautiful thing someone told me on the phone.

How do you relax? 

I go for a walk, play the piano or take a long bath.

What is the closest you've come to death? 

Quite a few times in cars, in water, on horseback and on motorcycles.

 What single thing would improve the quality of your life? 
Not dying.

 What do you consider your greatest achievement? 

Understanding that my parents are not gods, and that I'm not one, either.

What keeps you awake at night? 

Yesterday and tomorrow, but I eventually fall asleep because neither exists.

What song would you like played at your funeral? 

It doesn't really matter.

How would you like to be remembered? 

That doesn't really matter, either.





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